Editorials

Latest U-T San Diego editorials

Mayor Kevin Faulconer begins his second year as San Diego’s chief executive and political leader Tuesday, buoyed by polling that shows his first year a solidly popular success. But the final two years of his first term present much more difficult challenges, with significant political risks. The polling data reported by the U-T on Sunday showed Faulconer getting an impressive approval rating of 61 percent. A virtually equal number said San Diego is “headed in the right direction.” And a paltry 8 percent said the city is worse off today than a year ago. Positive numbers like that don’t just happen. Faulconer has worked hard to address concerns of segments of the public that are not a Republican’s natural allies, most particularly environmentalists, minorities and underserved communities. He took the global warming action plan that had been proposed by Councilman Todd Gloria during his stint as interim mayor and tweaked it in a way that satisfied the business community while still pleasing the Democratic majority on the City Council — no easy feat. He gave a big push to the ...

The news that California’s plastic-bag ban won’t take effect on July 1 because of a successful signature-gathering effort allowing the public to vote on the ban in 2016 is welcome. We need to have a full public debate on the wisdom of the ban instead of a debate dominated by the simplistic framing that this issue is about whether or not you’re for or against pollution. Some key points: • The claims of plastic bags ...

The San Diego County pension board is rapidly becoming a dysfunctional mess, made so by a bitter feud between two board members. The controversy is an ugly distraction at a time when the board faces its most critical issues in years, impacting literally billions of dollars. As reported by the U-T Watchdog’s Jeff McDonald, charges and countercharges of sexual harassment, discrimination and other inappropriate behavior have been circulated in emails by board trustees Samantha Begovich, ...

Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s stadium task force takes public testimony Monday afternoon at Qualcomm Stadium amid heavy pressure to formulate a plan in 90 days that can keep the Chargers from fleeing to Los Angeles — whether as an equal partner in a stadium venture in Carson with the Raiders or as a tenant or junior partner in a stadium in Inglewood that’s now seems well on its way to being built by Rams owner Stan ...

The policy of the U.S.-led alliance against the fanatical terrorists of the Islamic State has so far amounted to many hundreds of airstrikes to halt the IS offensives, along with efforts to train local forces to be the boots on the ground needed to reclaim broad swaths of northern Iraq and Syria from the self-declared caliphate. On paper, given the lack of American stomach for yet another American ground war in the Middle East, it ...

The state of California’s record on affordable housing is awful. A 2003 Public Policy Institute of California report laid out why. State laws mandate remedial action by individual cities instead of on a regional basis, which has worked much better in other states. State laws largely discourage developers from creating new housing stock at all price levels. State laws do a poor job of harnessing free-market forces to create less expensive housing. Government officials focus ...

President Obama’s veto of a congressional measure approving construction of the Keystone XL pipeline was in keeping with his administration’s farcical posturing on the project. He insisted he didn’t oppose construction of the $8 billion pipeline to deliver crude oil from Canada and North Dakota to Gulf refineries — just that he opposed Congress trying to “circumvent” the bureaucratic reviews needed to establish the project’s safety and necessity. This is preposterous. The only new evidence ...

After years of stagnation, and a few weeks of fast and furious developments, clarity is finally emerging in the effort to build a new NFL stadium that could keep the Chargers in San Diego. The head of the Metropolitan Transit System made it clear that the Chargers’ preferred site downtown is impossibly impractical, making the existing Qualcomm Stadium site in Mission Valley the only feasible choice. And County Supervisor Ron Roberts outlined a possible financing ...

District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis deserves high praise for the unprecedented report released last week reviewing 20 years of officer-involved shootings throughout San Diego County. It revealed important data that, if studied and put to constructive use by all law enforcement agencies in the region, may indeed help to reduce these incidents in the future. The nexus between police shootings and people who abuse drugs or have mental health issues is hardly new or startling. But ...

We suspect more than a few U-T readers were jarred by the contradictory nature of two recent stories. In one, Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, called for most California drivers to pay a “road user charge” of $1 a week — $52 a year — to raise $2 billion annually for much-needed infrastructure improvements, in particular our thousands of miles of pothole-pocked roads. In the other, the State Board of Equalization announced a tentative ...

Writing in these pages last month, former San Diego Planning Director Bill Fulton emphasized that the city must “transition from a suburban to an urban place.” He called this transition “inevitable” and warned that, if not done successfully, San Diego would “become not an elegant and well-functioning 21st century city, but rather an unworkable jumble of halfhearted efforts to both embrace and repel a more urban future.” Fulton’s view of the inevitability of San Diego’s ...

Obscured by all the frenetic maneuvering last week by the San Diego Chargers for a new stadium was the very basic question it all raises not just about the future of the Chargers, but about the very future of the NFL and America’s favorite sport. Can this possibly be sustainable? Consider that in 2004, when the Chargers were promoting an early proposal for a new stadium on a redeveloped Qualcomm Stadium site in Mission Valley, ...

The measles outbreak that began in Southern California and has spread to 17 states is having one side benefit. It’s prompting many to take a second look at the science showing the safety and importance of childhood vaccinations, and to disregard discredited claims linking vaccinations to the onset of autism. This group now includes the Autism Speaks organization. It’s been a leader in promoting autism awareness and sponsoring autism research, but it also has a ...

The University of California’s history of resisting close scrutiny of its fiscal practices has been justified as reflecting UC leaders’ determination to maintain independence from meddling politicians. But UC President Janet Napolitano’s success last fall in persuading UC regents to commit to five years of annual 5 percent tuition hikes unless more state funding is forthcoming has prompted state leaders to demand a closer look at UC’s books — and the initial results could scarcely ...

Six days ago, San Diego Chargers special counsel Mark Fabiani warned against any “half-baked scheme” to build a new stadium here. It was a brazen statement, delivered without shame to the mayoral task force that is the only hope for Fabiani and Chargers president Dean Spanos to secure hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money for the project. So how does one describe the bombshell of quickly scrambled plans dropped on the football world ...

In a week of big developments on the NFL stadium front, none came close to the bombshell arriving Thursday evening: the news that the Chargers and the Oakland Raiders have taken big steps toward building an equally shared, privately funded $1.7 billion stadium in Carson in southwest Los Angeles County. The teams have already purchased the 168-acre site of the former Carson Marketplace and secured support from Carson political and civic leaders — all with ...

This editorial page has for years called for major changes to U.S. immigration laws, including establishing a path to citizenship for the millions of unauthorized immigrants who have been constructive contributors to American life. At the same time, however, starting with some of the actions of President George W. Bush, we’ve expressed concern over how much executive power has expanded over the past 30 years. The president is not the king. Congress passes laws, the ...

Because of the long, deep relationship connecting the United States and Israel, some see the back-and-forth sniping between President Barack Obama and his surrogates, and the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as being the inconsequential product of a personality clash between headstrong leaders. Rep. Eliot L. Engel of New York, ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called it “a tempest in a teapot.” But as tensions build over Netanyahu’s unprecedented plan ...

At several points over the past two decades, when the Federal Communications Commission was implored to regulate the Internet, the idea that government should basically stay out of the way has prevailed. Given that the Internet has become the most broadly used and most transformative technological advance of the modern era, it’s difficult to criticize this history. Now a sweeping proposal to regulate the Internet is under consideration by the FCC, crafted in response to ...

The California parks system is a network of incredible wonderlands spread among 280 parks covering 1.6 million acres from the deserts to the mountains to the sea. But for years, the system has been plagued by bureaucratic mismanagement, badly deteriorating conditions in the parks, a $1 billion backlog in maintenance, and expenses that far surpassed revenues every year. New leadership in Sacramento, pushed by an independent commission co-chaired by former Sen. Christine Kehoe of San ...

California’s current governor, Jerry Brown, and all living ex-governors — Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gray Davis, Pete Wilson and George Deukmejian — say the California Environmental Quality Act could be streamlined in ways that would help the state’s economy without damaging the environment in any way. This bipartisan call for reform is also seen among legislative leaders. Earlier this month, Senate President Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, praised a CEQA modification measure proposed by state Sen. Hannah-Beth ...

When California’s new secretary of state, Alex Padilla, wanted to solicit citizen ideas about how to get more people to vote, how did he do it? The obvious way — he asked people to go online and submit their ideas. Nothing wrong with that; it’s just a variation of what officeholders and agencies do quite commonly to help people feel like they have a voice. Nobody took Padilla to court over it. Little Del Mar ...

San Diego officials are frustrated — frustrated, they say — that two city-run golf courses, at Balboa Park and Mission Bay, operate in the red to the tune of $2 million a year. But there are several possible solutions and all of them are easy. Pick one, City Hall, and implement it. One member of the city’s audit committee said better marketing could probably turn the two courses from red to black. The reply from ...

It doesn’t seem to matter much which party controls Congress or whether a single party controls both houses or just one. Either way, there is still unacceptable impasse on key issues. The latest — and most dangerous — example is the squabble over funding for the Department of Homeland Security. DHS is due to run out of money in two weeks. That’s right, the Department of Homeland Security, that mammoth federal agency whose mission is ...

In 2008, independent economists hired by the California Air Resources Board to review its plans to implement AB 32, the state’s landmark anti-global warming law, warned officials against presenting the measure as a broad boon to the state economy. Forcing California to use a higher percentage of cleaner but costlier fuels by 2020 was likely to hurt industries that competed with states and nations with lower energy costs, especially manufacturers. The most renowned of the ...

Tuesday’s U-T Watchdog revelation that then-California Public Utilities Commission President Michael Peevey met secretly in May 2013 at a Polish hotel with a Southern California Edison attorney sharply expands the scandal Peevey already faces because of his close relationship with Pacific Gas & Electric — a scandal that has prompted state and federal investigations. The topic of the meeting was Edison’s nightmare with the San Onofre nuclear power plant, which until just a few years ...

Awful decisions involving public employee retirement benefits made during the Legislature’s 1999-2000 session continue to haunt California. The deluge began with the September 1999 enactment of a 50 percent retroactive increase in pensions of most state employees. The California Public Employees’ Retirement System, astonishingly, told lawmakers this giveaway would have little or no long-term cost because the stock market boom would never end. That decision led most public employee unions around the Golden State to ...

The federal government’s war against itself over marijuana policy continues. Three new fronts have opened, involving the military, the Congress and, of all places, the Securities and Exchange Commission. The result is an even greater mishmash of mixed signals. In Washington state, where voters approved the use of recreational marijuana in 2012, the military brass at Joint Base Lewis-McChord south of Seattle sent out letters warning retail pot shops that military personnel are prohibited from ...